Integrating natural history and traditional ecological knowledge

Background/Question/Methods: Since Thoreau, some natural historians working in American landscapes have been as interested in the traditional ecological knowledge of Native Americans as they have their own field observations. I will survey the writings of prominent natural historians to determine whether they a) treat indigenous knowledge as culturally-filtered natural history distilled from generations of field observations; or b) parallel to their own, i.e. solely an individual's observations (whether contextualized by their scientific readings, or not.) I will then contrast thye observations of two famous natural historians--Ed Ricketts and Aldo Leopold--with the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples who have lived in the same habitats where they made their natural history observations. Results/Conclusions: I will present evidence suggesting that natural historians need to ethically access, understand, and systematically integrate traditional ecological knowledge of resident peoples far more than they have in the past. This knowledge is as much the "poor step child" of natural history as natural history is the poor step-child of experimental ecology. It needs elevated, liberated and treated with dignity.